About SeriousDiscussion

SeriousDiscussion is a subverse that houses intelligent discussion about meaningful or interesting ideas or issues. All posts and comments should be serious and contribute to the discussion. Be sure to check /v/discuss out as well!

Note: There may be long delays between moderating and enforcing rules. If you’d like to help out and become a mod of /v/SeriousDiscussion, please contact @Nurdoidz.

Rules

No low-effort posts or comments.

Posts should be serious and meaningful to you in some way.

Comments should contribute to the discussion.

Jokes are generally not allowed unless it accommodates a contributing comment or contributes itself.

No memes, trolling, or personal attacks.

Stay on-topic.

All comments must be on-topic.

If a discussion leads into another topic, please continue the discussion in a new thread.

All topics are allowed.

Topics can range anywhere from Voat changes to politics, gardening to video games, science developments to race car engineering, and everything in between.

Posts should state a stance or start the discussion in some way.

State your opinion, share some background information, etc.

Links should only be posted in the body of a post, along with an opinion statement or other contributing information. Link posts by themselves are not allowed.

2015-08-11 23:11:43: All of /v/AskVoat is taken over by controversial posts and Shiny makes a Megathread[ar] to explain what has happened and to try and contain the discussion within one thread. Every moderator reply on the thread gets downvoted and hidden.

My Issue

A dangerous view on how moderating should be.

In the announcement post, Atko has stated that he will not "support subverses with moderators who impose questionable rules such as 'your post has to end with a questionmark'". The problem with this view is that it is highly subjective, since it cannot really be properly defined, objectively, what is and isn't 'questionable'.

For example, in my sub, /v/seriousdiscussion, I have set the tone of the sub early on to reflect a strictly serious environment void of low effort, irrelevant comments and posts to protect a value I held early on in Voat. In order to protect this tone, I implemented a few 'questionable' rules that I thought were objective enough so they would be unabusable and protect the values that the sub was founded on. Granted, a lot of leeway is given to many posts and comments depending on how popular they are.

I would like to press the community here for their thoughts on this issue.